Media Day in the NBA is always a time for outsized expectations and happy chatter about championship aspirations even in places with lottery realities. But in Indiana, talk of taking “next steps” didn’t seem so fanciful back in October, not with the team coming off an appearance in the second round of the postseason and boasting a young roster bolstered by what appeared to be shrewd offseason additions.

No one was chuckling when coach Frank Vogel discussed the Pacers’ big plans. “Looking at it from a playoff standpoint we got to the second round last year, so we’re hoping to get further,” Vogel said. “We got a third seed in the regular season, so we’re hoping to do better than that. Those would both be probably the first steps in terms of taking that next step as a franchise. … We finished the season last year feeling like we were good enough to win a championship. We’re a team that sets our sights high, we shoot for the moon and then we work our butts off trying to get to those goals. We’re dreaming big here.”

What the Pacers have gotten, though, has been a nightmare start to the year. At 8-9 through the first month of the season, they're the most disappointing team in the NBA. They did lose small forward Danny Granger, the leading scorer from last season, to a balky knee at the end of October (Granger could return around the end of January), but the Pacers still have enough talent on the roster to adjust to Granger’s absence. What’s happened is a two-pronged problem for the Pacers: The young players they were hoping to see develop in Granger’s absence have actually taken steps backward, and the new guys the Pacers added have been awful across the board.

The most obvious culprits are two guys considered to be the future of the franchise, forward Paul George and center Roy Hibbert. George is 22, in his third year and is among the best raw athletes in the league. There has been talk in Indiana of trading away Granger in order to let George shine, but this year has shown that George is simply not ready to be a go-to scorer—he is taking the second-most shots among the Pacers, averaging 13.5 points on just 38.5 percent shooting.

George, at least, is a young player who has hit a snag in his development. If he is simply not as good as the Pacers had hoped, that’s easily explainable. What’s truly strange has been the deterioration of center Roy Hibbert’s game. Hibbert is 26 and was an All-Star last year, helping him to earn a max contract as a restricted free agent this summer. This year, he has slumped to 9.7 points on just 39.0 percent shooting from the field.

As much as George seemed prepared to fill the void left by Granger, it seemed a bigger opportunity for Hibbert to become more of an offensive force in the post, to get the Pacers to play more inside-out. It just

hasn’t happened, though. According to Synergy Sports, Hibbert ranks 93rd in the league in efficiency in the post, producing 0.661 points per possession—considering nearly half his offense comes in the post, that’s an exceptionally poor number. He is one of only eight players to have more than 100 possessions in the post, and he is dead last in efficiency among those players.

But George and Hibbert are not the whole problem here. Shooting woes have been contagious. Six of the Pacers’ rotation players are shooting below 40 percent, and one other, Sam Young, is at 40.5 percent. New guard D.J. Augustin was expected to fill the hole left by the trade of Darren Collison, but Augustin has been brutal, shooting just 27.1 percent from the field. The guy the Pacers got for Collison—center Ian Mahinmi—is shooting 39.3 percent, and the team’s expected sixth man, Gerald Green, is at 37.5 percent.

What is most amazing about the Pacers’ start, then, is not how bad they have been offensively, but how good their defense has been, allowing them to stay around .500 as they work through a horrible shooting stretch. The Pacers might have a hard time matching their No.3 seed from last year, but the Central Division is very much in play, with Tuesday night’s game against Chicago a key matchup as the Bulls and Pacers chase Milwaukee.

It’s not the position the Pacers expected to be in. With Chicago missing Derrick Rose and Milwaukee a .500-ish bunch, Indiana should be running away with the Central already. There’s still time for that, and the way the Pacers have defended is cause for hope. But if it is going to happen, someone is going to need to make some shots.